And that’s why we walked on by straight to Iraq.

its true

Most of the countries we're better than are third world savages

But most of the countries better than us are benefitting from our military supremacy.

yet we left Iraq and are still in Afghanistan. We knew there was no oil there when we launched the war.

I know specific oligarchs benefited from the war like Cheney through Haliburton.. but specifically how did we benefit from the oil? We left it in the hands of the Iraq govt. Hence why ISIS managed to seize parts of it when they started taking over.

Self conscious lol. We give no more of a **** about what happens to people in the Middle East than people in the Middle East give a **** about what happens in America. Give me a button that will save the lives of 100 people in the Middle East who would needlessly die in one of America's military ventures but I die in their place and I will stare at that button as a moral abstraction that means nothing to me. Show me pictures of all 100 people who would be saved at the price of my life and it wouldn't mean much more. Sit me down for a year and explain to me the lives of all those people, their friends, their family, their likes, their dislikes, their goals, their beliefs, what they're doing, what they've done, and then maybe it might start to sink in the moral question before me. But American media doesn't provide even a fraction of that kind of understanding of what we're doing throughout the world or even to our own people. It's just TV.

I've been saying it for years. Human beings are not capable of emotionally or intellectually understanding a world of 7 billion people and how they all interact. There's no moral mountain to climb with all of this ****. There's simply too much to understand for the human brain and nihilism is the only result.

Bad planning isn't evidence of non-imperialism.

We're all savages. We're just hiding it better with turtlenecks and rules of war. It wasn't third world savages who killed six million Jews in death factories.

What you're describing is universal. Very few people are principled enough to sacrifice themselves for the greater good

But we are better at least than our former selves in that we aren't carpet bombing cities. We actually consider collateral damage a bad thing.

This is actually not the norm for humans. We've been waging total war since Cain and Abel. And most societies today are quite behind on the times. The ones that aren't are usually being protected by the united States.

don't move the goal posts

We're talking about oil.

That's not due to lack of will, but lack of ability.

Genocide is very present in the third world.

And the Nazis weren't exactly big believers in the "rules of war"

Duh. America isn't ****. Humans are ****.

We aren't carpet bombing cities because we don't need to carpet bomb cities. NATO is a pretty good empire that encapsulates a significant portion of the world's most militarily and economically powerful countries. And we weren't that much more culturally advanced when we were carpet bombing cities. The difference between now and WW2 isn't one of cultural advancement, but one of treaty advancement. Start total war with China and I imagine cities will start to turn into glass regardless of rules of war that exist because the nations that agree upon them are allies.